VA officials try to cut red tape for vets in need

ROCKY HILL -- Linda Schwartz learned all she needed to know about military spirit and unity during the 1969 battle of Hamburger Hill in Vietnam. She was stationed at a medical staging area in Japan as a nurse when the casualties flooded in, including men with chest wounds who trudged in on foot because there were others hurt more seriously on stretchers.

Men who had such awful wounds that you could stick your hand in one side of them and out the other, said Schwartz, now commissioner of the state Department of Veterans Affairs.

Based at the State Veterans Home and Hospital complex in Rocky Hill, Schwartz, 68, earned her master's degree at the Yale School of Nursing in the 1980s. Her toughest battle today is caring for needy veterans and trying to prevent suicides in the veterans population. She can identify with injured military.

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In 1983 as a Reservist, she was nearly sucked out of a C141 aircraft in-flight when a hatch blew off. Her resulting injuries -- similar to a stroke or "the bends" -- left her unable to work for a few years and left her involuntarily discharged from the service (a low point in her life, she says).

"When you have a traumatic brain injury, that (suicide) is one of the first things you think of doing," Schwartz said. "Sometimes the depression is overwhelming."

Not suicidal back then but unable to remember her phone number from the injury, she received great help from a Naval medical unit and mentors at Yale. She worries today about troubled military folks, especially with the complexity of the system managing veterans benefits.

"At that time ... they were trying to get me to prove how disabled I was, which was not what I wanted," she said. The situation is better now, but the challenges over determining benefits continues. And the federal Department of Veterans Affairs often comes up short.

A man who lost his arm was told he had to come back in six months for a checkup or he would lose his benefits. "He said, "Did you expect my arm to grow back?'" Schwartz said.

The federal VA was not designed to function with challenges like today's long deployments in two wars. There aren't yet integrated computer systems to quickly process claims and medical help, she said. The VA wasn't designed and built from the ground up "like a fighter jet." It has emerged with layers of functions and processes, saddled by paper rules and records.

"It's not that people there don't know what to do. It's how do you get a system (to work smoothly) that cares for ... 22 million people and tries to provide" help for various disabilities? Schwartz said. She has heard the waiting period on a disability claim is more than 250 days.

It's a frustrating thing for those who have deployed and then come home to no job, a busted relationship or a bureaucratic VA.

"Here are war fighters and heroes and warriors and they come home, and they can't even get to square one with the VA?... So for them, they feel like people aren't doing their job."

She said about 21,000 veterans in the state are getting some disability benefits, and the state moved last year to expand its Military Support Program to deployed Army and Air Force personnel instead of just Guard and Reserve. But two simultaneous wars have spiked medical and psychiatric needs and suicide totals.

The 349 suicides in 2012, confirmed last week by a Department of Defense spokeswoman, marks the highest number since the Pentagon began closely tracking suicides in 2001.

Schwartz thinks they're even higher, given deaths that aren't listed as such for personal, religious or insurance reasons, and she was "shocked" that the Defense Department admitted to 349.

It's a complex thing to try to count recent suicides of veterans from many decades and wars, said Maureen Pasko of the VA's suicide prevention program. "Not all veterans come to the VA, and not all veterans are exposed to the VA, so there's lots I think we don't know."

Schwartz speaks in measured tones but her words are sometimes blunt:

"You can't do war on the cheap," Schwartz said of Iraq, "and that is what (Defense Secretary Donald) Rumsfeld tried to do."

The gated and guarded Rocky Hill state veterans facility, separate from federal VA facilities in West Haven and Newington, includes a residential program for vets facing homelessness and a 75-bed medical facility (mostly for substance abuse) that Schwartz ushered into existence four years ago.

With a varied nursing and service career that made her a bit of a pioneer for women in the military, Schwartz has testified before Congress many times about helping military women and Vietnam vets.

"I cannot relate to all that is going on with Iraq and Afghanistan, but I can tell you that because of Vietnam, I think everybody is doing a lot more to really try to be responsive to (returning soldiers') needs."

State Department of Mental Heath and Addiction Services official Jim Tackett also referenced Vietnam recently, saying "we had a whole generation come home symptomatic as hell, nobody knowing what was going on. We know too much about what goes on now, and certainly during demobilization the discussion begins."

Schwartz said she has made the state veterans affairs unit more veteran-focused, trying to deal with the "cumbersome nature of claims today," helping vets with paperwork through service offices in Milford, among other places.

She is asked about success stories, and talks about a Silver Star recipient.

"We had a young man; he was very brave," Schwartz said. "And he had facial injuries that were very extensive. And when he came home, his wife left him. So he tried to regroup his life and he lived with his mother. And his mother died. So he had to move to another place."

Schwartz heard about him and called him.

"And it was a rainy day. And he was sitting in his apartment, and he said, 'I was wondering what's gonna happen to me. How am I gonna live?' He sounded so depressed. So we were able to get one of our service officers who was in a town nearby to go over and buy him a cup of coffee. He got connected to other veterans in the community, and he's doing OK."